


The Waking Hours

by sahem62896



Category: Law & Order: SVU, Oz (TV)
Genre: M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:13:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1360273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sahem62896/pseuds/sahem62896
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris Keller spins a tale for Toby Beecher... and Olivia Benson!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waking Hours

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, I own no rights to any of the characters, quotations from other movies, or lyrics... I'm just having a little fun flexing my creative muscles.  
> \-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_"All of the time we're together in dreams..." —Roy Orbison_

 

Early morning sunlight spilled on to the hardwood floors of the apartment making them glow. Pigeons jostled for space on the window ledge outside, each one claiming the right to its territory in their strange language of hoots and trills. Six floors down on the congested streets of Manhattan, the hiss of city bus hydraulics and an occasional horn could be heard above the gentle murmur of the traffic. In the kitchen, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air and "Morning Edition" droned over the speakers of the radio which was tucked discreetly behind the sugar bowl on the countertop.

Still wearing the T-shirt and the white briefs he had slept in, Chris followed the smell of the coffee through the hallway and into the kitchen where Toby and Olivia sat on either sides of the breakfast bar. Except for the blazer, Olivia was dressed in her uniform with one corner of her dark red neckerchief covering her collarbone, the knot expertly hidden behind the gentle waves of dark brown hair. Most of her face was concealed by the coffee cup from which she was taking the last sips. Toby sat across from her in a white terrycloth robe, hunched over the newspaper, tapping the pen in his hand idly against his lower lip. The toe of one bare foot was scratching the arch of the other as he sweated over the clues of the _New York Times_ crossword puzzle.

Olivia's beautiful brown eyes appeared over the rim of her coffee cup and began to glow with warm friendliness. She set the cup down and smiled. "Well, good morning!" she hailed.

"Hiya Liv," he said drowsily as he walked over and kissed the top of her head. The smell of her hair was rich and pleasant. It also blended nicely with the scent coming from the coffee pot.

"Hey there," said Toby, looking up from his paper as Chris walked around the bar to get his morning kiss. Toby's face was covered in a bronzy stubble that somehow twinkled in the morning light, but was sandpapery and harsh on the corners of Chris's mouth. Chris often wished Toby would never shave; he loved both the look and the feel of those whiskers.

"Mornin' babe," he mumbled as their lips parted and he walked into the kitchen.

"Here, I already poured you one," Toby said, handing a cup to Chris.

Chris made a slow about-face and took the cup from Toby. "Thanks."

"Mmm-hmm," Toby responded, turning his attention back to the crossword puzzle.

Chris looked over at Olivia who was finishing the last bite of her bagel. A small white glob of cream cheese had escaped her bite and was stuck to her lip. She wiped it away with her thumb. "Want me to take that?" he asked her, pointing to her crumb covered plate and her empty cup.

"Mmmm!" she said, nodding and swallowing her food. "Thanks."

Chris set her cup on the plate and carried both to the sink. "Where you flying to this morning?"

"London," she answered, wiping her thumb on a napkin.

He set the dishes in the sink. "Oh yeah?"

"Yep."

"Well, tell the Queen I said hi," he said, returning to the breakfast bar next to Toby.

"Toby, Chris says hi," she said brightly.

Chris sputtered with laughter, his coffee cup inches away from his chin. Toby only peered up at her from his crossword puzzle, rolled his eyes, and shook his head. She looked over at Chris and gave him a wink.

"How long this time?" Chris asked after his laughter subsided. 

"A week," she said. Her mouth dropped open and her finger pointed at the ceiling. "Oh! Before I forget..."

"What's that?" Chris asked her.

Olivia stood up, straightened her skirt over her shapely legs, and pulled a folded up check out of her pocket. "I'll be back after the first, so there's my rent," she said, handing Chris the check.

"Ah okay," he said, taking it from her and securing it to the front of the refrigerator with a magnet. "Thanks."

" _Your_ rent?" Toby said looking up from the paper and setting the pen down. "You mean your _cat's_ rent, right?"

She regarded him with one eyebrow raised. "Don't mock Vern. He happens to be smarter than you." 

"Then you tell him to go to the law firm for nine hours and I'll stay home and shit in a box full of sand," he shot back.

"And I'll still have to clean it up," Chris chimed in.

She couldn't help laughing. "You two are awful!" she said, wadding up her napkin and tossing it at them. Toby snatched it out of the air an inch away from his face and smiled.

"You knew that when you moved in with us, my dear," Toby said.

"Yeah, I know," she said, stepping into the pair of black shoes at the base of her stool.

"Hey, speaking of awful," Toby said, turning to Chris, "must have been a hell of a dream you were having last night."

Chris acknowledged Toby with a nod and sipped at his coffee.

"Oh, another one of Chris Keller's dreams," Olivia said, taking her seat again at the breakfast bar, looking fascinated. "I never get tired of these."

"Just what I need," Chris grumbled. "Another morning of you two tag-teaming my ass."

"Oh come on," coaxed Toby, slipping an arm around Chris's waist and smiling wryly. "That tortured little mind of yours with its vivid dreams made half of all this possible." He drew a circle in the air with his finger.

"Don't you mean a third?" Olivia asked.

Toby regarded her with a look that would have made Bea Arthur proud. "When your cat gets a job, then it will be a third."

Olivia's lower lip dove under her teeth and her eyes went wide. She snatched the newspaper out from under Toby's hand and held it just out of his reach. When he made another move for it, she flung it at the coffee table. It landed on the floor next to it with a smack.

Toby sighed and turned his best hopeful puppy-dog look on Chris. "Honey, I love you."

Chris nodded, knowing what was expected of him. "Thanks Liv," he muttered and went to fetch the paper.

"Hey Chris, while you're over there, could you..." Olivia began a second later, looking over her shoulder.

"No!" Chris said, bending over and snagging the paper with his fingers.

She turned back to Toby and tipped him the wink this time. Toby grinned back broadly. Mornings like this with Chris and Chris's best friend — now their roommate — were priceless. By now, he was actually glad that Olivia Benson had moved into the spare bedroom after their last roommate had left a few months ago. And while her cat was a snob who deigned to acknowledge the existence of the other males around him only when it was feeding time, Olivia regularly brought levity and a little pleasant chaos to his and Chris's life. She and Chris had known each other since they were in grade school and they clearly loved each other's company. And while Toby liked her too, he was also immensely grateful she also had her own life outside of Chris, one which she tended to with the same amount of energy and good humor that she brought into their home. Though he never would have said so out loud, it was actually one of the reasons Toby had found it impossible not to like her right from the start. She took nothing away from him as far as Chris was concerned and had, in fact, added some much needed humor into his own life... though it sometimes at Chris's expense. Like now, for example.

Chris came back to the breakfast bar with the newspaper folded over his finger. He offered it to Toby, who glanced at it for one second before looking up at Chris and shaking his head.

"Oh, I don't need it anymore. I'm done with it." A small, tight smile appeared on his face.

Chris blinked once and said, "Okay then, I'll just go line Vern's box with it."

Toby snatched the newspaper out of his hand, his smile brightening. "Gimme that damn thing!"

Olivia tittered from her seat. "Who needs TV when I can live with you two?" she remarked.

"That's why we don't make you pay the cable bill," Chris said.

"I know," she said, hooking an errant lock of hair out of her face with her little finger. "So come on, Chris. Tell us about this dream."

Chris picked up his coffee cup. "Dreamed I was in prison," he said after taking another sip of coffee. He tapped Toby on the shoulder once and said, "With you, I might add." 

"Oh yeah? What did we do to get in there?"

"Well, you had gotten in there before me," Chris explained. "DUI. You got behind the wheel of your car drunk out of your mind and ran over a little girl on her bicycle."

Toby didn't look up from the paper, but he did look surprised. "Oh, lovely."

"And I had gotten arrested for gunning down a store clerk in some drug-fueled robbery gone bad," he said. "But the whole time, I was also trying to hide the fact that I had tortured and murdered three Chelsea boys."

Olivia's eyes went wide and she flinched. "Whoa!"

This time Toby did look up from his paper. "By any chance, was one of them that wispy little bitch who waited on us at that Mexican restaurant you like on Eighth Avenue?" he asked .

"Like I said," Chris said, setting his coffee cup down, "you can either hear the answer to the question you asked, or you can bust my chops."

"Sorry," Toby said. "Go ahead, boo."

"Wait," Olivia interrupted, putting her hand on Toby's wrist. "Did the cop you named after me in your last book arrest you?"

Chris shook his head. "Nah, she and Stabler might have been looking for the guy who did the Chelsea killings, but they wouldn't have arrested me for the robbery that landed me in Oz."

"Oz?" Toby asked, his eyes going wide with amusement. The newspaper was now completely forgotten. "We ended up in _fucking Oz_ for these killings?" he asked, trying hard not to laugh.

"Yeah, Oswald. You know, that prison upstate?"

"Oh!" Olivia and Toby said almost in unison. 

"Yeah," Chris said, "in the dream they kept calling it 'Oz.'"

"You know, Liv," Toby said, a wry grin creeping across his features. "Good thing he explained that, otherwise I might have thought he was gay or something."

"Oh Auntie Em!" she cried, her hands going dramatically to her chest. "It was a real, truly live place! And I remember that some of it wasn't very nice...."

Toby snorted. "But you're home!" he added. "And this is your room and we're all here.... and....Oh, Auntie Em...."

"There's no place like home!" the two of them chorused before they burst out laughing.

"I wish I had never even introduced you two," Chris grumbled as he poured himself another cup of coffee.

"Awww, don't get mad," Olivia said.

"He's not," Toby said, patting Chris on the tip of his nose with his index finger. "Are you?"

"Oh, hell no. I live for this," Chris retorted.

Toby slipped his arm around Chris's waist and hugged him close. "I'm sorry, honey. We'll listen nicely now."

"I'm very fragile emotionally, you know," Chris said, putting on his best pout.

Toby put his hand on the side of Chris's head, drew him in, and kissed him once on the forehead. "Better?"

The sulky look on Chris's face brightened a bit and he nodded. "Mmm-hmmm."

Toby smiled and let him go. "Okay, then. Go on."

Chris straightened up. "Well, it was just really freaky because you, Toby, had somehow managed to get revenge on some skinhead who had been raping and abusing you from the minute you walked through the gates, and the skinhead had convinced me that I had to help him get back at you for that."

This time, it was Toby whose eyes went wide. "Wow!"

"How'd he get revenge?" Olivia asked, putting her elbows on the counter and resting her chin in her hands. "Toby, I mean."

"Well, all the cells in this part of Oswald were made of glass," Chris said. "And one day he got high on some powerful angel dust that he had gotten from another prisoner and threw a chair through the glass of the skinhead's cell." He turned to Toby and pointed a finger at him. "And the glass blinded the skinhead in one eye!"

"Nice!" Olivia exclaimed, sitting up straight.

"Boom, baby!" Toby said, punching the palm of his left hand.

"That's not nearly as good as what you did to him next," Chris said.

"Oh, there's more?" Toby asked. He was now fully engrossed, partly because he knew he would never even survive one night in prison.

"Oh yeah," Chris said, his face clearly showing that he was enjoying telling this. "He tried to beat you up in the prison gym afterwards, and you knocked him out with a free weight, pinned him under a weight bench, and shat right on his face."

Olivia's face twisted in disgust. "Oh gross!"

Toby was eating this up. "Jesus!" he said, "I didn't know I could be so violent and crazy!" He looked at Olivia and jerked his thumb in Chris's direction. "Like I said, that guy's tortured mind and his vivid dreams are the stuff that great books are made of."

"Indeed," Olivia agreed. "So how did you get involved in all this?"

Chris had his cup halfway to his mouth. He pointed at Olivia while still holding it and said, "Now, that was part of what made this such a fucked up dream."

"Oh, this is going to be good," Toby said, leaning on the counter. 

"You say that now," Chris said after taking a sip. Toby made a another circle in the air with his finger, this one a sign urging Chris to hurry up. Chris nodded and set his cup down. "Well, apparently I got blackmailed by the skinhead into falling in love with you and leading you into a trap."

Olivia gasped, and Toby's mouth dropped open in shock. "You helped him kill me?"

"Not kill," Chris said. He suddenly felt guilty as if he had actually taken part in such a horrid thing. "I helped him break your arms and legs."

"Oh my God!" Olivia exclaimed as Toby whistled and shook his head.

"I know, right?" Chris bit his lip and looked a bit ashamed.

"Damn," Toby said, shaking his head. "I didn't know you were so angry with me. Maybe we need marriage counseling."

"Toby..." Chris said, putting his hand on Toby's shoulder. He actually did feel strangely guilty all of a sudden. The problem with having vivid dreams and an excellent ability to both remember and recount them, Chris believed, was moments like this when he felt like he had to apologize for having them.

"Well, he said he was being blackmailed into it," Olivia said, trying to come to the rescue. "Was it because the skinhead knew about the Chelsea boys you had killed?"

Chris shrugged. "I don't know. Most likely."

Toby squeezed Chris's hand gently. "Did I at least shank you both for doing that to me?" he asked, smiling in a way that let Chris know he had nothing to fear.

"You got _me_ with a shank," Chris said.

"See, now that's true love," Toby commented, trying to get some humor back into the conversation. "There's so much pain involved."

Olivia nodded and smiled. "Yeah." Turning back to Chris, she asked, "And the skinhead?"

"Toby went after the skinhead's sons."

A devious grin spread across Toby's face. "Yeah," he drawled. "Destroy that motherfucker by destroying his loved ones!"

"Mmm," Chris nodded, sipping at his coffee. He swallowed and said, "Then there was all the drama that you and I had to go through to work out our little tiffs! Oh my God, you wanna talk about a dysfunctional relationship!"

"Well did you guys finally team up to get the Nazi?" Olivia asked, glancing at her watch. She had an airplane to catch and passengers to serve, but she was enjoying this story too much.

"Yeah, but that was the oddest part of all," Chris said. "Somehow, everyone in the prison ended up in a production of _Macbeth_ where the Nazi was playing Macbeth and Toby was playing Macduff. I was the prop guy, and I managed to switch Toby's prop knife with a real one. That's how the skinhead finally gets it."

Toby couldn't hold back a laugh that was genuine but also full of astonishment. Olivia was shaking her head in amazement. "Now that," she said, "is one hell of an ending!"

Chris smiled wanly and inclined his head in her direction, but there was more to the story that he was not prepared to tell them... like how in the dream, the relationship between himself and Toby ended because Toby found out about the murders in Chelsea and had decided to work with the FBI in exchange for a parole... and that rather than face the consequences, he had dove over a second floor railing in the prison screaming Toby's name, therefore pinning his own death on Toby and also preventing him from testifying against him. He had woken from the dream in the same way that most people do; he had sat up, drenched in sweat with a cry bursting from his lips as his dream-self hit the ground. As he sat there in the darkened bedroom trying to re-orient himself, he heard Toby saying his name and asking if he was okay. The first words that came to mind were: 'Oh Toby, holy shit! You didn't coöperate with the Feds after all!' He would have said them too had past experience not taught him that it was best not to say anything right after awakening. It seemed that anything he said right after waking up from dreams like this tended to upset Toby, and that more than the dream itself tended to make it harder to shake it all off and go back to sleep. And now, with the full brightness of the morning shining in and a few hours of dreamless sleep fetched between then and now, Chris still felt as if holding his tongue was the most prudent thing to do.

Olivia slid off her chair and collected her blazer from the back of it where it was draped. "Well, I think you should turn that one into your next book," she said, slipping it on and pulling her hair out from under the collar. Now she definitely looked the part of a Delta Air Lines flight attendant. "I think it's got promise."

"I agree with her," Toby said.

Olivia nodded. "It's exactly the kind of thing I would be reading on a flight like this one." She took a quick glance at her watch and said, "Speaking of which, I need to get my ass out to JFK to get on it."

"Safe travels, Liv," Toby said, spreading his arms.

She went to him and gave him a quick hug, then pecked Chris once on the cheek before giving him a hug too. "Love you guys," she said.

"Love you too, kiddo," Chris said. "Don't worry about Vern."

"I rarely do," she said, walking to the front door where her suitcase waited for her. "He's in good hands... and his rent has been paid." She winked at Toby.

"Well, we can't miss _you_ if you don't leave," Toby quipped.

She pulled up the handle of the suitcase. It made a sharp click as its height reached her hip. "Then start missing me right now," she said, waving and smiling.

"Bye Liv," Chris said, waving back.

She opened the front door, went through it, and disappeared down the hallway.

"I _do_ agree with her," Toby said as the door clicked shut. "You should write it."

"Yeah?" Chris asked.

"Yep," he said, collecting the dishes and putting them in the sink. A sly smile touched his face as he turned back to Chris who was now turning to a different page in the _Times_. "In fact, I wanna see a first draft of the first chapter on that table when I get back from work or I'll airhole ya!" With that, he dug his finger into Chris's side and cackled as Chris, who was extremely ticklish, squirmed and laughed.

As the two men embraced and shared a kiss, the cat emerged from behind the sofa where he had been sleeping and stretched. He stood in a patch of sunlight for a moment, glowering at the two stupid, noisy creatures who had awakened him and in whose care he had been so thoughtlessly left. Having once again deemed them both beneath him, he leapt into the window sill to watch the pigeons bicker and the traffic crawl.


End file.
